Christmas Cards ’16

Christmas Cards for 2016 – The Making Of…

I made it a personal goal to create my own Christmas Cards to send out to friends and family for the past three years now. Every year it’s a challenge to create something different than previous while also not making it to time-consuming considering I do minimum 60 cards a year. So it has to be fun, unique and not to difficult to keep reproducing.

Pinterest was a huge inspiration source for this year and from there I went material hunting, paper purchasing and started experimenting and practice for the final cards. I knew I wanted to do something that involved elegance with calligraphy, nothing printed. So I started with collecting all the necessary materials: Card paper, envelopes, blue inks, pens and nibs, snowflakes of varying materials and sizes, gemstones, bows and glue.

The Process of Snowflakes

The process first started out with assembling the snowflakes and getting them painted. Each card has 3 snowflakes on it. One base snowflake which was made out of glittered plastic bought from the local Morrison’s. I then paired them each with a mid-flake, made out of paper and coloured, plus a front-small flake which was either paper or foam. The mid-flakes were then taken out to be spray painted in blue hues. One light and one dark blue with varying gradients and textures to add that unique/custom touch.

Spray Painting

Drying

In Groups

Snowflake Group

Once painted and grouped it’s time for glueing them together and adding gems. To give them that real pop 3D-glue was used similar to square cushions but gave a lot more flexibility. On the largest snowflake turquoise gems were place at the top and sides, so they created a triangle, using standard liquid glue. On the front snowflake a rounded stone was placed using liquid glue as well. Once the glue was dry and had set the snowflakes were glued to the cards front along with a silver bow at the top.

3D Glue

Adding of bow

Adding of gemstones

The Process of Calligraphy

Calligraphy has been a passion of mine for a while but never truly practiced it. This was my chance and I took trying out different methods and textures to get that elegant feel that I wanted. After practicing different styles, using water, and trying different techniques I came up with a simple typographic style that was uniform. Using two different blue inks I stuck with a strict color palette and using a water pen for added effect. Inside I drew simple guidelines to where the text would be, inked on the text and names and repeated the same on the front.

Front

Experiments

Stamp

Main text

After the text was on and dry I added an ink stamp of the foam snowflakes to the inside for decoration using a water pen to drag the remaining ink into the card.

The Finished Products

In the end every card was unique. Each snowflake placed and paired were different than the other with no two alike. I managed to photograph the last few before they were sent out as well to their destinations. Overall they were fun to put together and became a huge learning curve. I just hope their recipients got as much joy out of them as I did creating them.